Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2021 i Smithsonian Magazine

Truffle Trove What a wonderful article (“Earthly Delights,” June 2021). Technology, art, perseverance, philosophy and dreams all melded together to produce a much-loved culinary treat that just may save Southern farms. — Jacquie Lindsay | Raleigh, North Carolina Nice story about truffles in North Carolina. You might want to check out what’s happening on the other side of the country. My friend Dawn Meiklejohn and her Lagotto Romagnolo, Lidia, have been hunting and selling truffles here in western Washington and Oregon for years—as well as educating chefs and the public. —Michal Nortness | via email Sacred Struggle “The Sacred Runner” (June 2021) moved me to tears, and I was shamed again by actions taken by our government against the proud Native Americans. It also lessened my admiration for Theodore Roosevelt,…

IN MAY 1835 IN Willamette Falls, Oregon, an eager young Philadelphia naturalist named John Kirk Townsend collected a female California condor. It’s one of the oldest specimens among the Smithsonian’s 625,000 preserved bird skins, the third-largest collection in the world. A bouquet of tags attached to the condor’s legs, along with the original label in Townsend’s copperplate handwriting, shows it has become only more valuable to science over the decades. Every natural specimen is full of information about the time and place from which it came, but it also suggests a story about the people who discovered or collected it. Townsend’s condor, as well as more than 130 other bird specimens that he pre pared and that are kept at the National Museum of Natural History, are part of a…

In December 1792, a 46-year-old French botanist named André Michaux arrived in Philadelphia to visit with some of the city’s most influential citizens. Michaux had spent much of his adult life sloshing across muddy rivers and hacking through mosquito-infested forests. But he could clean up and turn on the charm when it suited his purposes, as it did when he paid a call on Benjamin Rush, the physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Rush’s colleague Benjamin Barton, a well-known naturalist. Both men belonged to the American Philosophical Society, the nation’s foremost scientific organization, which had been founded 50 years earlier to promote “useful knowledge.” Michaux, the educated son of a farmer, told Barton that it would be useful for the United States to have “geographical knowledge of…

AFTER A YEAR of absence, returning to my office in the Smithsonian Castle has renewed my wonder in the history that surrounds me and in the growth that nearly two centuries has brought. I walk past the crypt of James Smithson, who first envisioned this institution. I stroll through the Enid A. Haupt Garden, home to several American bison in the late 1880s. I pass through rooms that held the Smithsonian’s earliest collections, 19th-century herbarium specimens and technical apparatuses. I arrive at my office, where for decades my predecessors and I have pondered the same question: How can the Smithsonian best serve the American people? This year, the Smithsonian’s 175th anniversary, offers an opportunity to remember where we’ve been and appreciate what we’ve accomplished. And especially after all the nation…

THE GREAT RONDOUT TRAIN ROBBERY 1924 TAKE: $3M in jewelry, cash, bonds IN 2021 MONEY: $46.85M DATE: June 12, 1924 CULPRITS: The Newton Bros., Brent Glasscock, William Fahy (conspirator) LOCATION: Rondout, Illinois The elaborate plan involved a corrupt postal inspector, homemade tear gas, disguises and four stolen Cadillacs. But the scheme unraveled. One outlaw shot another, making it possible for the police to track them down. ROY GARDNER’S ROSEVILLE ROBBERY 1921 TAKE: $187,000 IN 2021 MONEY: $2.78M DATE: May 19, 1921 CULPRITS: Roy Gardner LOCATION: Roseville, California Months earlier, Gardner was being taken to prison aboard a train in Oregon when he distracted the marshals guarding him, took a gun, cuffed them both and fled to Canada. His robbery of a Southern Pacific train in Califronia landed him at Alcatraz. MINERAL RANGE RAILROAD ROBBERY…

IT SEEMED NEW YORK CITY had its own Jack the Ripper. In April 1891, the mutilated body of Carrie Brown, a former self-styled actor, turned up in what the New York Times called a “squalid” lodging house of “unsavory reputation.” The fame that eluded her in life found her now, with the newspapers eagerly serving up lurid details, factual or not. Brown supposedly once recited a scene from Romeo and Juliet atop a saloon table. Her penchant for quoting the bard, coupled with her age—she was 60—earned her the nickname “Old Shakespeare.” She also, it appears, had worked as a prostitute, which along with the heinousness of the crime, including an X carved into her skin, fueled comparisons to the depredations of Jack the Ripper, who had begun terrorizing London…

THE NATION WAS PREPARING to celebrate the inauguration of James Garfield in the United States National Museum, today called the Arts and Industries Building. The edifice was not scheduled to debut for several months, so workers moved quickly to install temporary floorboards and thousands of coat racks and hat bins. State flags were hung from above. A statue, America, which resembled the Roman goddess Libertas, was erected in the rotunda beneath the building’s dome, her raised torch lit by a new device, Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb. On inauguration night—March 4, 1881—guests must have noticed how different this building was from other grand museums. The massive exhibition hall in which they toasted the new president was open, with no walls to divide the space. Overhead were skylights, innovative but perhaps…

Across 1 Tumults 5 Human behavior subj. 8 Exposé journalist such as Jacob Riis 11 Supporting a tax on the 1 percent, maybe 12 Migrate to L.A. via Santa Fe, say 13 Inner trio between Q and U 16 Three-letter eponym in the ice cream aisle 17 Housing manager, for short 18 Swanky parties 21 One of millions stacked in Val Shively’s store 22 No longer interested in 23 Ike Eisenhower’s mil. rank 24 Archaeological setup in Saqqara, Egypt 25 New sport for the Olympics in 2021 28 Technical feature of note within Stonehenge 31 Upper-rightmost island of the Canary Islands 32 Read the first letters of each clue in order, and you might exclaim this afterward 33 Not named, for short Down 1 Simon & Garfunkel’s “I ___ Rock”…

Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans, so Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun packed their photography archive—thousands of slides, negatives and prints the couple had amassed over three decades documenting African American life in Louisiana. They filled a dozen plastic bins, which they stacked high on tables. Then they drove to Houston with their two children, planning to be gone for maybe two weeks. Ten weeks later, McCormick and Calhoun returned home to… devastation. “All there was, was waterlogged,” Calhoun says. “Imagine the smell—all that stuff had been in that mud and mold.” They figured they had lost everything, including the archive, but their teenage son urged them not to throw it away. They put the archive into a freezer, to prevent further deterioration. With an electronic scanner they…

Q:Why did James Smithson leave his fortune to the United States and not to institutions in his native England? — Helen Scott | New York City THE SMITHSONIAN’S founding donor never even visited the United States. His father was a duke and his mother was a distant relative of King Henry VIII, but because they never married, James Smithson wasn’t treated well by class-obsessed English society. He did manage to amass a fortune, and he left it all to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, with one caveat: If his nephew died childless (which he did in 1835, six years after Smithson’s own death), the money would go “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase &…